A senior diplomat from a country on the Security Council complained recently
that the United States needed to provide consistent signals about Iraqi sovereignty. As an
example, he said [Colin] Powell’s recent statement that the United States would pull its
forces out if asked after June 30 was at odds with Mr. Bush’s statement that the United States
would persevere and not allow itself to be driven from Iraq. “It’s a complete contradiction,” the
diplomat said.

OK, you know we’re talking about David Brooks, who claimed “Bush believes the U.S. has a
unique role to play in [the] struggle to complete democracy’s triumph over tyranny and so drain
the swamp of terror.” We hoped then that when the “triumph over tyranny” did “drain the swamp
of terror,” it would also do a clean-up job on the purplemeister’s prose.

The last time we mentioned him, in February, we were struck by his assertion that the White
House nitwit is inarticulate, “like most of us.” We took that as an insult, believing
as we do that in the inarticulate department the nitwit is peerless.